White House Watch: May 3, 2009 - May 9, 2009

I wrote yesterday about Obama's underreaction to the latest deadly airstrikes in Afghanistan. Elisabeth Bumiller and Carlotta Gall write in the New York Times: "United States officials acknowledged Thursday for the first time that at least some of what might...

Stephen Colbert is furious about Obama's decision not to observe the National Day of Prayer the way the religious right wanted him to. "He's praying in private? The only things a president should be doing in private is extraditing prisoners...

President Obama this morning served up the details of his extraordinarily ambitious budget, bringing it in at $3.4 trillion and 1374 pages. It may be, as Obama said in his remarks, that "[t]he question the American people are asking is...

Former vice president Cheney says he's not going to shut up, no matter what some of his fellow Republicans -- and even his former boss -- think about it. Cheney hagiographer Stephen F. Hayes once again interviewed the former veep,...

My Live Online discussion yesterday started just moments after the news broke that Maine had become the fifth state to legalize same-sex marriage. It made me realize how odd it was for a major civil-rights movement to be making huge...

Karen DeYoung profiles Obama's national security adviser, James L. Jones, for The Washington Post: "In recent weeks, Jones has been portrayed in foreign policy articles and blogs as too measured and low-key to keep pace with the hard chargers working...

The International Committee of the Red Cross confirmed yesterday that "dozens of people, including women and children," were killed in U.S. air strikes on villages in Western Afghanistan Monday night. You might think something like this would weigh heavily on...

An injured child from the Bala Baluk district of Afghanistan yesterday. (AP/Abdul Malek) There's a tremendous sense of urgency surrounding President Obama's meetings today with the leaders of Afghanistan and Pakistan. And a sense of urgency often leads people to...

A long-awaited internal Justice Department report promises to shed some much-needed light on the relationship between the Justice Department lawyers who wrote the infamous "torture memos" and the White House. The central question, of course: Whether the lawyers were themselves...

Bernie Becker blogs for the New York Times with more information about Obama's dinner with critics of his bank bailout plan. We already knew Nobel Prize winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman (who is also a New York Times...

Stephen Colbert argues that Bush administration officials should publicly explain their torture rationales -- to children. He proposes something like this: "Kids, Mr. Bunny was a bad, bad bunny. And he had information that President Raccoon needed. So the president...

Obama announces his new tax plans yesterday (AP/Charles Dharapak). President Obama seems to have a love-hate relationship with fat cats. One day, he's a full-throated populist, calling for a wholesale rewriting of the economic rules that favor the wealthy. And...

David Espo writes for the Associated Press: "After weeks of concentrating their attacks against President Barack Obama on the economy, Republicans are branching out. They're taking aim at his anti-terrorism policy. 'Just what is the administration's overarching plan to take...

Stephen Colbert tries to crack the code word Obama used when describing his criteria for picking a new Supreme Court Justice. "Now I was puzzled by the word 'empathy' -- because I'd never heard it before," Colbert says. He even...

As torture chronicler extraordinaire Mark Danner has pointed out, one of the great paradoxes of the torture scandal "is that it is not about things we didn't know but about things we did know and did nothing about." It was,...

Ryan J. Donmoyer writes for Bloomberg: "President Barack Obama proposed to raise about $190 billion over the next decade by outlawing three offshore tax-avoidance techniques used by U.S. companies such as Caterpillar Inc. and Procter & Gamble Co. He also...

Who knew such an innocent-sounding word could get people so riled up? But conservatives are finding much to hate in President Obama's assertion on Friday that he considers "empathy" a prerequisite for a Supreme Court justice. In a surprise appearance...

It's always worth celebrating when a president willingly pierces the White House bubble. Evan Thomas writes in Newsweek with this bit of news: "Mindful of his predecessor, Barack Obama seems to be trying harder to make sure he hears all...